Enclosure, Clooneen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Some places are notable precisely because they have ceased to exist.
In the townland of Clooneen in north County Kerry, a circular enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, carefully noted and given its place among the landscape features of the time. By the revised mapping of 1916, it had vanished from the record entirely, and today no visible trace remains on the ground.
Circular enclosures of this kind are generally understood as the remains of early medieval farmsteads, the enclosed homestead of a single family or small community, defined by an earthen bank or stone wall drawn in a rough ring around a dwelling and its yard. Thousands once dotted the Irish countryside. The Clooneen example was documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which drew on earlier cartographic evidence to note its existence. What the original enclosure looked like, how large it was, or how it came to disappear between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the record does not say. It may have been levelled for agriculture, absorbed into field systems, or simply allowed to erode away over generations of use and weather.